In my mind, everybody in this room goes bloody. They’re just meat, and I’m wondering: Where’s the stunt camera? I mean, really. Death by asteroid? I thought I was more important than this.
The loudspeaker clicks on. Everybody twitches. Maybe it’s a militia-led public execution. They happen often enough that I’m starting to look forward to them. The routine comforts me. Which is fucked up, obviously. I know that, so don’t take notes or underline this or whatever.
The assistant principal or vice-secretary or some jackass’s voice pipes through. “This can’t be right,” she says.
“Just read it!” some guy demands.
“Darlins, I got some bad news,” she says. I realize it’s Miss Ross, a native Colony Eight who teaches auto shop. She gave me a C-, which I hated her for but deserved. “Aporia’s gonna interrupt satellite communication pretty soon, so don’t be surprised if your phones stop working. Also, new research tells us that impact is thirty-six hours away; not three days. Angle’s closer to 70 percent. They’re saying Detroit—what’s that, about a hundred and fifty from here?—can that be right?”
“Keep reading,” the other voice tells her through a muffle of static.
“Dang it! I heard you the first time!” she says. “About ten minutes ago, President Brickerson sent out a last communication. Since most of your crank phones don’t have Freenet, the militia wants me to pass it along… Brickerson says not to worry. The rocket will… eviscerate? Sure, okay, that’s a word. It’ll eviscerate Aporia before impact. Until then, we gotta stay put. So there’s no looting, transgressors between colonies’ll be shot. Anyone caught stealing fuel’ll be shot… Anyone messing… Ah, forget it. Run, darlins’. Just run. Get as far away as—”
Nguyen clicks off the loudspeaker. It doesn’t spare us. We still hear the gunshot. I go hard in a place that ought to be soft over something like this, which doesn’t mean I enjoy it. I’ve also been known to fantasize about drowning puppies, and I kind of like puppies.
Nguyen lets the reverb settle, then takes the quiz from my desk and crinkles it into a ball. Tosses it like a hoop-shot but misses the garbage. “Who wants a lesson in falling bodies?”
Twenty minutes later, he’s got it all written out. Seventy degrees, density = 8000kn/m3, speed at impact: 30km/s. Force = a trillion megatons. He’s not smiling or pretending to be brave. He touches the word megatons on the blackboard, totally freaked out.
“Meg-A-Tons…” he says. The guy’s a Tesla nerd—he figured out how to turn garbage into gasoline and there’s rumors he siphoned the refinery’s generators to power his house. “Would you ladies and gentlemen find it comforting to have me describe impact to you?”
I’m not ready to be comforted. There’s still tricks in this pony. But everybody else seems relieved, like, Thank God. They can finally all surrender to the awful truth.
Nguyen squints, picturing the whole thing. “If it collides with Detroit, we’ll see the blaze in under a minute. Brighter than the sun. The whole sky will be red. Don’t worry. It won’t hurt. Our nerves will go before our minds… It’s like the distance between thunder and lightning during a storm. It should be quite beautiful.”
I’m thinking about how if you cut somebody’s head off fast enough, then turn it around, they can see their own detached body. This does not sound especially beautiful to me. “What about people in Omaha? Offutt? My family’s there,” I say.
He slaps his khakis with his wooden pointer, then winces in pain. It’s a weird thing to do, all things considered. “All three of them left without you?”
I nod. “Yeah. I know it’s supposed to be whole families, but I guess the president cut down on tickets. So I told them to go ahead without me.” I’m lying, obviously. If I had my way, my parents would have stayed behind like grown-ups, and it would be me and Cathy in that shelter.
“You didn’t get a ticket?” Nguyen asks.
I nod. Nguyen looks at me for an uncomfortably long time. Slaps his leg with the pointer again. It’s weird. I can’t be the only loser he knows who got left behind like a Mormon at the anti-rapture.
“Okay!” he claps. “Good question! Will! Offutt! Survive!? It all depends on how deep underground they are—what their ventilation apparatus looks like. They’ll survive the heat and seismic turmoil, but no one knows about the ejecta. Who can describe ejecta for me?”
Carole Fergussin raises her hand. “It’s the rocks and stuff the asteroid kicks up.”
“Right!” Nguyen says. “Ejecta! There’s evidence that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sprayed ejecta as high as the moon before it rained back down into our atmosphere. Our guess is that the rocks will be about the same temperature as volcanic lava, and about the size of aerosol particles. So, our friends in the shelters might survive underground, but we’ve got no idea for how long. It depends on the quality and pervasity of the ejecta and the apparatus they constructed in its anticipation.”
“Couldn’t we have done something before now, Mr. Nguyen?” Anais Bignault asks. She’s crazy skinny, like she stopped eating a week ago but her skeleton insists on taking the rest of her out for strolls.
“Call me Fred,” he says, and Jesus, I don’t want to call him that.
“What if we all get together, everybody in Pigment. In the whole Colony? We dig a shelter?” Carole Fergussin asks. She’s wiping the tears from her big, brown eyes. I feel like Carole and Anais ought to get an award for best sad puppy impressions on the eve of apocalypse.
Then I picture drowning them.
Nguyen shrugs. “I wish they’d selected me to engineer something like that. I really do. But with impact 36 hours away, can we build something that we can survive inside for ten years? Twenty? Ten thousand?”
“Can we?” I ask.
Nguyen points out the window at the refinery. It smokes above metal spires three miles away. “We’d need a lot of fuel. And a small population.”
“Like Offutt,” Carole says.
Nguyen nods.
I’m picturing Cathy in a dark, underground city. Picturing her safe and loved. Picturing the evolution of the survivors, people like my parents, over a thousand generations. I’m trying real hard to find the bright spot, here, but the future looks pretty monstrous.
“Did I ever tell you my parents’ story?” Nguyen asks, then answers himself in a lower voice: “Of course I didn’t. Why would I do that?”
“Tell us,” Carole says through her sniffles. I consider throwing my desk and announcing that this is not group therapy. During my last hours on Earth, I do not want to hear anyone’s crappy life story. I just want to hold my baby sister. Oh, yeah. And not die.
“It really was the last plane,” Nguyen says. “My father bribed a town official for the spot. And here I am today. I never wondered about those other people left behind. Survivors don’t do that kind of thing. But now I wonder. That’s because we’re not the survivors anymore. But we’re still the heroes of our own stories. You understand?”
I don’t. I want him dead. I imagine that I am Aporia, colliding. I am bigger than this whole planet, and my wrath is infinite.
“What I’m saying is, I always thought I’d be famous and my children would be rich. Why else would I be so lucky, born in America? But does dying make me less? I’m still Fred Nguyen, aren’t I?”
He looks at me, “Some of you, your parents abandoned you. Some people sold their own children’s tickets. That makes them villains, you understand? But you can still be heroes.”
The kid in the back row who used to be Harvard bait spits a wad of chewed-up quiz. “Liar!” he says. “Human consciousness was a bad mutation. Aporia is Earth’s self-correct. There’s nothing after this.”